When it comes to political gamesmanship or sportsman like conduct, if such even exist, the GOP is afflicted with the curiously peculiar disease of Benjamin Button and has retrogressed to a pre-adolescent narcissistic child who upsets the board and tantrums when it realizes that the outcome it seeks cannot be realized1. Republican Senator of Illinois, Mark Kirk, may be up for reelection and vulnerable to being unseated, but he is still correct in calling out his GOP colleagues: They should just “man up and cast a vote. … Your whole job is to either say yes or no and explain why.“

With more than 10 months remaining in the year and approximately 9 months before America’s next presidential election, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia died on February 13, 2016. Granted, Obama is a lame duck president, but the constitution clearly states: “Power to nominate the Justices is vested in the President of the United States, and appointments are made with the advice and consent of the Senate.” While I am not a lawyer or a legal expert on constitutional law, reading comprehension skills and common sense lead me to to conclude that it contains no language enpowering the Senate to suspend this authority or modify the functional process of judicial nominations, regardless of the time of year.

The GOP legislature doesn’t want to do its job and, furthermore, it is intent on sabotaging the executive branch from fulfilling its own duties. Concerning their argument of letting the American people decide who the next justice is, the American people who elected Obama as president (not that I am even a big fan of him or all of his policies) won this right and privilege to decide by virtue of victoriously electing their candidate as president. The GOP refuses to respect the fact that the people who elected the president are entitled to 4 years of his political representation and executive authority, not 3/4. As the the late Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

1For example, if Trump (whose politics and tactics I do not favor) ends up winning the popular vote in a bid for presidential candidacy, then the chairman of the RNC (Republican National Convention), Reince Priebus, and the party’s vanguard, are prepared to subvert the will of the people by contesting his nomination at the convention in an effort to select a nominee who has fallen well short of winning in the primary election process.